Art Today

Art & Today is an innovative and extensive survey of international contemporary art from the 1980s to the present. Over four hundred of the most significant contemporary artists from around the world are represented in this comprehensive overview - some emerging, some mid-career, and others long established. Each of the book's sixteen chapters address recurring and relevant themes as diverse as "Art & Popular Culture," "Art & Its Institutions," and "Art & Globalism," rather than follow a strict chronological, geographical, or stylistic structure. Lively and up-to-date, Art & Today explores an era in which art defies simple categorization. The result is a surprising and original yet clear and reasoned perspective on contemporary art that breaks from prescribed classifications to offer a survey as expansive as the art it describes. For instance, in the chapter "Art & the Body," one might find performance discussed alongside figurative painting, sculpture and photography alongside video, and North American artists alongside Asian artists. The chapter "Art and Globalism" discusses artists whose nationality, generation, and medium are as diverse as those of Alan Sekula, Michal Rovner, Cildo Meireles, Manuel Ocampo, Chen Zhen, and Andreas Gursky. Internationally renowned art critic and scholar Eleanor Heartney is respected for her clear language and pragmatic approach to contemporary art. Her straightforward, engaging descriptions and explanations will appeal to both experts and newcomers alike, and will serve as an invaluable resource for years to come.

In Art Today Brandon Taylor charts the ideas and practices of contemporary art across a wide international spectrum. From Minimalism and Conceptualism to video and film, from painting and sculpture to performance and installation, he shows how advanced art has continued to provoke and perplex a fascinated public. Art Today shows how the new art of the last three decades has been energized not merely by changing technologies of art-making, but by the spread of new museum architecture, by the voice of the critic, and in recent times by the activity of the powerful international curator. It also shows how the dominant narrative of advanced art in the USA and Western Europe has been invigorated by an expanding international network, from the West Coast of America, from Eastern and Central Europe, and more recently from Asia and Africa. Reviewing the major controversies of the later twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, it also includes a discussion of the impact of the internet and digital art. Generously illustrated in colour, Art Today is a guiding narrative to the most adventurous art of our time.

What is art? The contributors to Theories of Art Today address the assertion that the term “art” no longer holds meaning. They explore a variety of issues including: aesthetic and institutional theories of art, feminist perspectives on the philosophy of art, the question of whether art is a cluster concept, and the relevance of tribal art to philosophical aesthetics. Contributors to this book include such distinguished philosophers and historians as Arthur Danto, Joseph Margolis, and George Dickie.

Icelandic culture is so strongly oriented towards language that the visual arts didn't truly begin to develop until the early twentieth century - which is remarkable for a Western country. This unique situation may explain the nature of the contemporary art scene in Iceland. Even though Conceptual art remains a considerable international influence, and globalization is most certainly affecting this isolated island in the North Atlantic, Icelandic art continues to develop at its own speed, marked by a playful creative energy and the pleasure of experimentation. Icelandic Art Today introduces 50 of the country's most important artists - including Finnbogi Petursson, Gabriela Fridriksdottir, Helgi Thorgils Fridjonsson, Icelandic Love Corporation, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Margret H. Blondal, Olafur Olafsson + Libia Castro, Ragnar Kjartansson and Ruri and Steingrimur Eyfjord - who have contributed to the contemporary landscape of Icelandic art from the 1970s through the present. Essays by historian and curator Christian Schoen, critic Halldor Bjorn Runolfsson and Director of the Reykjavik Art Museum Hafthor Yngvason trace the development of Iceland's avant-garde over the past 40 years.

This idea-packed compendium presents the work of todays top wood artists in over 500 photos. More than 130 artists from nine countries are showcased, including furniture makers, turners, and sculptors who borrow ideas and techniques from one another to create their art. Teachers of art history, creative art, craft, industrial design, and woodwork will discover new material for teaching about wood as a medium.

Explore the work of three generations of fine artists who have opened their minds and spirits to the boundless range of expressive possibilities in textile methods or materials. Even as the art on these pages references weaving, crochet or quilting, traditional textile notions disappear in the hands of serious artists, appropriating essential elements for their contemporary concepts

Indonesia is one of the coutnries where exciting art is still waiting to be discovered. Over the past ten years, a growing number of group exhibitions and survey shows have presented Indonesian art. What has been sorely lacking is a book about the country's best-known artists. "Sip!--Indonesian Art Today" introduces readers to 16 established and young artists, presenting each of them with recent works. Farah Wardani, director of the Indonesian Visual Art Archive, Yogyakarta, has compiled brief texts shedding light on the artist's conceptions. Biographical information, exhibition histories, bibliographies, and portraits of the artists complement the illustrations. The curator Enin Supriyanto, a leading expert on the Indonesian art scene, has contributed an essay examinging the most recent developments in Indonesian art, tying them back to the art history of the past forty years and mapping them to the transformations in Indonesian society and politics during the same period. A timeline extending from the 1970s to the present additionally visualizes the most important moments in art, in Indonesia and abroad, making the book an indispensable compendium for collectors and curators, students of art and everyone who is interested.

Postwar Italian Art History Today brings fresh critical consideration to the parameters and impact of Italian art and visual culture studies of the past several decades. Taking its cue from the thirty-year anniversary of curator Germano Celant's landmark exhibition at PS1 in New York – The Knot – this volume presents innovative case studies and emphasizes new methodologies deployed in the study of postwar Italian art as a means to evaluate the current state of the field. Included are fifteen essays that each examine, from a different viewpoint, the issues, concerns, and questions driving postwar Italian art history. The editors and contributors call for a systematic reconsideration of the artistic origins of postwar Italian art, the terminology that is used to describe the work produced, and key personalities and institutions that promoted and supported the development and marketing of this art in Italy and abroad.